Journey of a Salesforce Geek

Review: Apex Academy Part 1

I recently started my journey into learning more about how to do code development within Salesforce. I felt a need or dare I say an itch I needed to scratch, to better understand what is going on beneath the hood in all of my Apex classes and triggers.

As a good place to start, I was referred to by the Internet gods, to try out Apex Academy which is created by David Liu (sfdc99.com) and hosted on the PluralSight course site. Starting on his website, I was able to get a pretty good feel of how and what the course would contain and it was definitely enough to peak my interest.

Before I dive further into my review of the first part of this course, I want to share some background about myself, as it will show some of my possible biases when it comes to coding. In college, I studied JAVA, VisualBasic, SQL, and something else that I cannot remember. Finally, post-college in one of my first jobs I tried to work in Python by doing codeacademy. At this point you are probably wondering why I just listed every code language I have touched, well the point is I have tried to learn these many different languages, and with the exception of passing my college courses and being able to make websites, NOTHING ever stuck and I most certainly could not go bust out some wonderfully useful code for anything.

That being said, Apex Academy/ David Liu has somehow found the perfect spot where it is making the information stick and is actually usable outside of the virtual classroom. Trust me, I was totally suspicious before I started…I figured this would be another codeacademy course, that goes in one ear and out the other, but it’s not.

This course treats you like a smart adult and understands that you may have no coding experience but tries going at teaching code through a completely different method than the standard way. David makes sure to always cover the basics, but instead of just giving definition after definition with only a useless example, he gives everything he says a real-world Salesforce example that you go and apply today.

So far with this course, I have been able to learn how to write basic triggers and how to create tests classes, which David has done a successful job of making me love. I have also learned the key fundamental building blocks that one will need for creating triggers of any type.

This course is followed by two more courses that get slightly more advanced with each round. This is the shortest of the 3, as the second is many hours long. However, I think this is worth my time and my money to PluralSight.

Stay tuned, as I will be posting about the 2nd and 3rd courses as I complete them.